How to Fix ITER

There is no easy way to repair the dysfunctions of a complex international bureaucracy that spans multiple continents, has few clear lines of authority, and must oversee the construction of the largest experimental nuclear device in history—the massive machine being built in the South of France called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER. Last summer, William Madia, a respected nuclear chemist and academician, and two other specialists, Charles Shank and T. J. Glauthier, set out to understand ITER’s failings and to figure out how they could be corrected. “Achieving the desired outcome will not be simple,” they noted. “There is no ‘silver bullet.’ ”

Madia and his colleagues had been tasked with conducting a regular internal management assessment of ITER, an audit that the organization must undergo every two years. In June, when it was officially announced that Madia would be overseeing the audit, people working within ITER hoped that the organization’s deep structural problems, which have been plaguing the project for years, contributing to endless delays and rising costs, would finally find clear articulation, and that constructive ways to fix them would be found.

Madia has had a distinguished career. He is an Army veteran and a former executive at Battelle, and he maintains myriad prestigious affiliations, from Stanford to M.I.T. As the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 2000 to 2003, he oversaw early construction of the Spallation Neutron Source, a $1.4 billion research device designed to generate neutrons. The machine was completed on budget and ahead of schedule, and when it was switched on, in 2006, it was proclaimed “a model for all future large scale scientific projects to emulate.”

The report that Madia’s team produced for ITER in October offers an honest and unflinching portrait of the struggling international organization. Since a final draft was published, it has been guarded by ITER’s leadership with extreme secrecy. One persistent criticism of ITER is its lack of transparency, and many scientists involved in fusion research fear that bureaucratic opacity may interfere with the implementation of Madia’s candid advice. The United States Senate is taking the document so seriously that it has insisted on making twelve per cent of the American financial contribution to ITER conditional on a meaningful implementation of its eleven recommendations. This year, the U.S. budget for ITER is two hundred million dollars.

It is natural for a large organization to want to conduct a confidential assessment of itself, so that its problems can be discussed frankly and then addressed. At the same time, ITER is the world’s most expensive energy experiment—a publicly funded project costing at least twenty billion dollars, if not more—and it has long struggled to solve its problems. The organization is, in an urgent sense, at a crossroads. A great deal is now at stake. And so we have decided to post the executive summary of the Madia report, which outlines his team’s eleven proposals—advice that may well be critical in turning the organization around and insuring its success.